Oracle Blog

David G. Simmons' Weblog. Mostly about Sun SPOTs

Customer Service

It has been suggested that I blog this (something I wrote in email, during a discussion of the sorry state of "customer service" in the world today).

So, without further comment (other than a plug for this site which will help you at least bypass some of the annoying IVRs):

In case you hadn't noticed yet, customer service is dead.

"Your call is important to us. In order to demonstrate this, we have fired most human operators, and outsourced the rest to India. In order to not pay even those operators the $1.00 per hour we have contracted, we will now ask you to spend the next 20 minutes pressing a series of buttons to answer questions about your problem, none of which actually relate to your problem. Following that, you will be placed on hold for another 10 - 40 minutes and forced to listen to the most annoying music we could find (please rest assured that we are actively searching for more annoying music to play for you on future calls). In the unlikely event that you actually DO get to speak to a human operator, we have provided them with a script from which to read. As a cost-saving measure, they are not allowed to deviate from this script by even one word. As you can no doubt gather by now, there is an almost zero probability that your question will be answered in even a remotely satisfactory manner via the telephone. We suggest, therefor, that you use our equally confusing and archaic website to submit your question. That way our automated mail-response system can send you a pre-written answer that is guaranteed not to answer your question. By doing this you can get the aforementioned useless answer in a much more efficient and timely manner without actually bothering us. All emails will be answered with the same canned, pre-scripted response, so really we suggest that you solve your problem yourself and quit bothering us. Thank you for your business as a valued customer."

That's the full translation. :-)

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a major grant from the National Endowment for the Inanities.]

When my VPN token card stopped working, I went though this hell with our internal support. It took a week to finally fix the problem and only then because it had finally bounced around to enough different people that it landed on the task list of someone who didn't live on the script. It took him 5 minutes to fix the problem. So, how much money did we lose for my week of lost work so we could "save" money by hiring trained monkeys to read scripts for bananas in payment?